The Binary Oppositions In Pride And Prejudice And Narrative Effects

Pride and Prejudice is the most popular masterpiece of Jane Austen (1775-1817) who was one of the greatest novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is well known for its light irony, humor, delicate description and analysis of characters and vivid depiction of contemporary English country life, especially the interesting characters and their intricate relations with one another. Film and TV producers and screenwriters, foreseeing the potential value of its adaptation, lost no time to adapt it for movies and TV screen. The Hollywood film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1940, which was produced by MGM. The film gained both popular and critical success. Comparing the original novel and the film, it is noticeable that the 1940 version made various alterations to the novel, especially the changes on characters. Several characters and plots that they are involved in are deleted in the film-Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, Maria Lucas, etc.This thesis aims at providing an analysis on the altered narrative effects of the 1940 film led by its deletion of some characters. The author attempts to approach and compare the novel and the film from a structuralist perspective. Structuralist criticism focuses on the structure of literary works. By analyzing the structure of numerous literary works and manifesting the rules of the functioning of the structures, it aims at revealing the essence and meaning of literature. To find binary oppositions in the text is the basic approach of structuralist criticism. The present thesis first makes efforts to work out the binary oppositions of the characters in the novel based on A. J. Greimas's theory on "the Actantial Model". According to Greimas, narratives contain six actants that form three binary oppositions-Subject/Object, Sender/Receiver, Helper/Opponent. The hypothesis is that the pairings of the characters produce different kinds of narrative effects like irony and contrast, etc.Then by comparing the novel with the 1940 film, the thesis attempts to use Roland Barthes's theory of "the nuclei and catalyser functions" to discuss how the deletion of certain characters affects and destroys the original binary oppositions of characters,...